Expert: Donald Rosenfeld - 8/4/2006

Question
How do meteorologists initialize the models when they admit all possible parameters of data cannot be known?  If they ran the  model "backwards"so to speak, would this prove the reliabilty of the models?

Answer
Hi Tom

The models ask for certain data. As research indicates, scale, grid, number of obs, types of obs, all get improved and the models are tweaked just as other science improves.

NOAA does have backward re-analysis going on so as to see how computer models do with different tweaks.

For more, see:

http://tinyurl.com/lzsxq

http://plato.asu.edu/slides/kostelich.pdf